Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/344

338  (11 xii. 182, 230, 250, 287, 350).—Formerly the Japanese believed that to hear the first song of the cuckoo while in an outhouse was calamitous, whereas it was lucky when heard in a plantation of Colocasia antiquorum: therefore every noble family made it a usage to keep in the outhouse this vegetable, planted in a pot (Onos, 'Kazan Zôdan,' 1741, tom. iv.). The cuckoo in question is Cuculus polycephalus, not the British species, C. canorus, which latter also occurs in Japan, but has no significant folk-lore attached to it.

In Abbott's 'Macedonian Folk-Lore,' 1903, pp. 290-91, we are told:—

Of the same pattern are the subjoined Japanese folk-tales:—

(11 S. xii. 161, 231).—The 1913 edition of 'Cassell's Book of Quotations,' in a note on p. 638, says "Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa" "occurs in Seneca's 'Œdipus,' l. 126; but the passage Bacon seems to have had in mind is 'Stultitia est timore mortis mori' (Ep. 69)." At p. 856 the above-mentioned edition recognizes only as an Italian proverb the sentiment "Pejor est bello timor ipse belli," which is from Seneca's 'Thyestis,' l. 572 (see King's 'Classical and Foreign Quotations,' 1904, No. 2061).

(12 S. i. 166, 232).—I am very much obliged to and to other of your correspondents who have kindly sent me cuttings from a second-hand bookseller's catalogue containing (presumably) the book I was in search of. I have thus been enabled to obtain the 'Apology addressed to the Travellers' Club; or, Anecdotes of Monkeys,' published by John Murray in 1825. But, alas! it cannot be the book I am in search of, for though it contains numerous and humorous "anecdotes of monkeys," it does not comprise the two extremely pathetic ones of "sailor monkeys" that are in my mind—one of a monkey who threw itself overboard because it had lost its mate, and the other who similarly committed suicide because it had been punished or neglected by the captain and sailors for some breach of discipline.